The god laughed coldly. “What an extraordinarily stubborn insect,” it said to Yi Yi. “It makes you even more loathsome. But, for the sake of killing time, let me surpass your array-art.”

Yi Yi laughed back. “It’s impossible. First of all, you aren’t human, so you can’t feel with a human’s soul. Human art to you is only a flower on a stone slab. Technology can’t help you surmount this obstacle.”

“Technology can surmount this obstacle as easily as snapping your fingers. Give me your DNA!”

Yi Yi was confused. “Give the god one of your hairs!” Bigtooth prompted him. Yi Yi reached up and plucked out a hair; an invisible suction force drew the hair into the sphere. A while later, the hair fell from the sphere, drifting to the plane. The god had only extracted a bit of skin from its root.

The sphere roiled with white light, then gradually became clear. It was now filled with transparent liquid in which strings of bubbles rose. Next, Yi Yi spotted a ball the size of an egg yolk inside the liquid, made pale red by the sunlight shining through, as if it were luminous in and of itself. The ball soon grew. Yi Yi realized that it was a curled-up embryo, its bulging eyes squeezed shut, its oversized head crisscrossed with red blood vessels. The embryo continued to mature. The tiny body finally uncurled and swam frog-like in the sphere of liquid. The liquid gradually became cloudy, so that the sunlight coming through the sphere revealed only a blurry silhouette that continued to rapidly mature until it became that of a swimming grown man. At this point, the sphere reverted to its original opaque, glowing state, and a naked human fell out of it and onto the plane.

Yi Yi’s clone stood up unsteadily, the sunlight glistening off his wet form. He was long-haired and long-bearded, but one could tell that he was only in his thirties or forties. Aside from the wiry thinness, he didn’t look at all like the original Yi Yi.

The clone stood stiffly, gazing dully into the infinite distance, as if completely oblivious to the universe he’d just joined. Above him, the sphere’s white light dimmed, before extinguishing altogether. The sphere itself disappeared as if evaporating. But just then, Yi Yi thought he saw something else light up, and realized that it was the clone’s eyes. The dullness had been replaced with the divine gleam of wisdom. In this moment, Yi Yi would learn, the god had transferred all his memories to the clone body.

“Cold … so this is cold?” A breeze had blown past. The clone had wrapped his arms around his slick shoulders, shivering, but his voice was full of delighted surprise. “This is cold! This is pain, immaculate, impeccable pain, the sensation I scoured the stars for, as piercing as the ten-dimensional string through time and space, as crystalline as a diamond of pure energy at the heart of a star, ah …” He spread his emaciated arms and beheld the Milky Way. “Qian bu jian gu ren, hou bu jian lai zhe, nian yu zhou zhi—” A spate of shivers left the clone’s teeth chattering. He hurriedly stopped commemorating his birth and ran over to warm himself over the incinerator.